Date: 4:30pm EDT September 17, 2013

Author Justin Torres will be the first guest of the “Chicano/a & Latino/a Voices Series”

Bio

Justin Torres is the author of the novel We the Animals. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, the Guardian, Harper’s, Tin House and have been featured on NPR.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Torres has received a Rolón Fellowship in literature from United States Artists, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. We the Animals, a national bestseller, has been translated into fifteen languages.

Excerpt from We the Animals

“We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats, we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.”

About We the Animals

Three brothers tear their way through childhood – smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn – he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white – and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.

Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.

Written in magical language with unforgettable images, this is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.

“We the Animals is a gorgeous, deeply humane book. Every page sings, and every scene startles. I think we’ll all be reading Justin Torres for years to come.”